9/11

September 23, 2014

With today’s “unleashing [of] a torrent of cruise missiles and precision-guided bombs from the air and sea,” global eyes in this endless “war on terror” are clearly focused on Syria today. But take a look at the front page of the New York Times this morning, and you might be struck instead by coverage of another avenue available to stop terror, or at least terrorizing circumstances - lawsuits!

First, a jury has for the first time, found a bank liable for damages “for knowingly supporting terrorism efforts connected to two dozen attacks in the Middle East.” Writes the Times,

Arab Bank, a major Middle Eastern bank with $46 billion in assets, was accused of knowingly supporting specific terrorist acts in and around Israel during the second Palestinian uprising of the early 2000s.

The verdict is expected to have a strong impact on similar legal efforts to hold financial institutions responsible for wrongdoing by their clients, even if the institutions followed banking rules, and could be seen as a deterrent for banks that conduct business in violent areas.

Later in the article, we learn some of what the jury did and didn’t hear:

The bank refused to turn over a large number of the requested documents in the case, citing the privacy laws of the countries where it does business. As a result, a judge who oversaw the case issued sanctions, including one that prevented Arab Bank from telling the jury why it withheld those documents, though the plaintiffs were free to tell the jury that the documents had been held back.

The bank then asked the Supreme Court to overturn the sanctions. The Obama administration was split: The State Department pushed for Supreme Court intervention; Jordan, where the bank has its headquarters, is a loyal ally, officials there said. Others wanted the court to stay out of it: Tax and treasury officials did not want banks to hide behind foreign bank-secrecy laws in their investigations, and other justice divisions felt that the department should not be intervening against American victims of terrorist attacks.

The Supreme Court declined to hear the case, and it went to trial with a version of the sanctions in place. Along with the ruling about document withholding, those sanctions specified that jurors “may, but are not required to, infer” that the defendant provided financial services to Hamas, and that the defendant did so knowingly, according to instructions from the judge, Brian M. Cogan.

The case now goes to the Second Circuit. In light of all this, the bank's attorneys believe they have a good case. We’ll be watching.

Turning to the terrifying world of U.S. prisons, specifically New York’s Rikers Island, we have one very angry U.S. Attorney who has now, “criticized the [New York City Mayor Bill] de Blasio administration for the first time, suggesting that New York officials were not moving quickly enough to make reforms at Rikers and warning that his office stood ready to file a civil rights lawsuit against the city to force changes.” This all comes in the wake of yesterday’sNew York Times story, “which revealed that key portions of a report on violence at Rikers had been withheld from federal investigators and that officials involved in reporting distorted data were promoted.” Specifically,

A dozen investigators eventually produced a confidential report, obtained by The New York Times, which concluded that hundreds of inmate fights had been omitted from departmental statistics; that the warden, William Clemons, and the deputy warden, Turhan Gumusdere, had “abdicated all responsibility” in reporting the statistics and that both should be demoted.

If, as has been reported, incomplete and inaccurate information has been provided to us, and questionable promotions may have occurred, it does not instill confidence in us that the City will quickly meet its constitutional obligations. We are not, at this early stage, jumping to conclusions about the City’s commitment to change, and our dialogue is ongoing. However, now that the 49-day waiting period has elapsed and all options are available to us, we stand ready to take legal action to compel long-overdue reforms at Rikers, if that becomes necessary to get the job done.

Read those New York Times articles for a full understanding of prison terror in our own back yard. And here's another lesson - withholding information usually backfires. Just ask, I dunno, the tobacco industry, Richard Nixon, General Motors...

April 02, 2014

In congressional testimony this week, GM CEO Mary Barra announced that the company has hired and would soon be meeting with “special master of disaster” Ken Feinberg, to help them “evaluate the situation and recommend the best path forward.” Not “best path forward” as in “do we need more recalls?” This is about GM’s victims.

First a reminder. As we noted in this recent post, in 2009, GM cut a deal with the government to reorganize under bankruptcy laws. This deal bailed out the company and immunized it from every product liability claim it had at the time - a reprehensible immunity deal the company did not need, which kicked these claims out of court and left hundreds of victims with nothing. Since the faulty ignition switch disaster, there has been a significant push to force GM to compensate pre-bankruptcy victims of not only the switch defect, but also all defects - i.e., all claims that were kicked out of court at that time, switch or not. (See yesterday’s letter to GM from consumer groups and consumer advocates.)

Rather than announce any sort of fund this week, GM has hired Ken Feinberg to tell them what to do (but only with regard to the switch defect. So to begin, that’s too bad.)

Since 9/11, Mr. Feinberg has been the “go to” guy to divvy up money to victims in two situations: 1. victims harmed by large events, who have no recourse in the courts (as for the 9/11 victims); and, 2. victims harmed by extremely negligent companies, who are facing large numbers of claims and who want to stop or weaken lawsuits (as in BP’s Gulf Coast disaster.) GM now finds itself in both camps. So watch closely what GM and Mr. Feinberg do next.

As to the pre-bankruptcy claims, for which the company is currently immune, the situation is similar to Feinberg’s task following 9/11. There, the airlines received immunity from most litigation, so Congress tacked onto the immunity bill an entitlement program that afforded 9/11 victims a pretty good avenue for compensation. Mr. Feinberg was brought in to make those determinations.

However, the BP situation was very different. BP was/is an oil giant that caused an enormous disaster. The company hired Mr. Feinberg to figure out how to compensate its victims while encouraging people not to sue it. To accomplish this, BP paid Feinberg’s law firm, Feinberg Rozen, $850,000 per month to essentially represent the company as its attorney while directly engaging victims (often) outside of the presence of their own counsel in a judicially unsupervised claims process. He had duties of confidentiality and loyalty to BP; he was required to turn over all claims information to BP; and, BP had a central role in hiring and firing everyone Feinberg brought on to help. Notably, Feinberg required that families sign away all legal rights not only for themselves, but for their spouse, their children, their parents and all of their heirs even though no one knew then what losses they might suffer in the future due to this ongoing disaster. This sweeping release, which assigned victims' claims to BP, benefited only one actor: BP -- the company that paid Mr. Feinberg's salary.

In a strong rebuke to BP and Feinberg ethics, a federal judge ruled that it was misleading for Feinberg to call himself “neutral” or “independent” of BP in administering the fund. Renowned legal ethics expert Monroe Freedman said, “The opinion therefore confirms that Feinberg has been engaging in unethical conduct that has been misleading claimants and posing a serious threat to the administration of justice.”

The lesson here is that courts are the proper venue to compensate victims and hold accountable negligent companies who have harmed large numbers of people. Victim compensation funds are a last resort only in unique situations where court cases are not possible due to some sort of immunity.

We don’t yet know the type of victim fund Feinberg and GM may propose, assuming they do. A fund for the pre-bankruptcy victims who currently have no recourse in court? Good idea. But extending this fund to cover post-bankruptcy victims to compete with class actions that are currently proceeding, and coaxing victims to stay out of court while signing away their rights? If it's possible to do this, it should not be allowed.

Earlier, Monroe Freedman discussed the wide-ranging implications of the BP and Feinberg set up, where a compensation fund could “be used in any case in which a defendant is potentially liable for multiple causes of action and/or a class action – e.g., for an oil spill; an airplane crash; a pharmaceutical that causes disability, death, or birth defects; etc. … It seems to me that this kind of device can effectively nullify applicable ethical duties, as well as seriously impair access to justice on the part of claimants. Shouldn’t something be done about this?”

It was a dangerous precedent. Let’s hope GM does not follow BP’s lead.

April 16, 2013

There’s a great Mr. Rogers quote running around the Internet
today: “When I was a boy and I would see scary
things in the news, my mother would say to me, ‘Look for the helpers. You will
always find people who are helping.” For
those of us who were in Lower Manhattan on 9/11, we know that’s true. Thank you to the helpers. Our hearts go out to everyone in Boston today.

There’s really little more to say on a day like this. But some PopTort readers may find the latest
newsletter from the Center for Justice & Democracy somewhat
interesting. It deals with the topic of sports and its
lead story is about spectators at sporting events. The article discusses one of Congress’s first responses to 9/11 - an
immunity law, called The Safety Act of
2002. While really aimed at the developers of anti-terror technologies and usually
bestowed on defense and security companies, sports venues are now qualifying
for immunity too. Indeed last
year, Yankee Stadium became the first big sports venue to earn this Department
of Homeland Security special designation, “meaning that the facility has passed a battery of tests
and won approval from DHS, giving the franchise broad
immunity against lawsuits stemming from a terrorist attack on
the stadium.” And since that time, NFL
and Superbowl venues have received liability protection, as well.

September 13, 2012

Terrorist attacks.
Crashing security systems around U.S. facilities. Security personnel unable to control
disorder. Those poor folks in all those far-away places, like Libya, Egypt, and Yemen, right? But here’s what else you need to worry about right now: U.S. nuclear power
plants.

The 20 million people who live within 50 miles of the Indian
Point nuclear power near New York City are at tremendous risk, according to a
lawsuit just filed by Clifton “Skip” Travis Jr., a former Indian Point worker.
Here’s what Mr. Travis, who like many nuclear whistleblowers alleges a campaign of retaliation
against him, says:

“I understand they’re in business
to make money ... but my job, my concern, my obligation is to defend that
facility against radiological sabotage,” Travis said during an interview
Wednesday, frequently repeating his belief that a terrorist attack on the plant
is inevitable. “It was never my intention to hurt them. ... This is not a
vendetta. This is holding them accountable.”

The lawsuit paints a doomsday
picture of what security lapses could mean to those living in the so-called
“meltdown zone.”

Travis said that in each of the
past two years, the plant’s force-on-force drills — where mock adversaries
attack the plant — ended with the “terrorists” taking over their intended
targets. And since he was hired, the terrorists have won at least half the
time, he said.

One of the times the security force
won, he said, was during a “choreographed” drill when Gagnon had the attackers
run uphill at fixed positions because it was raining and he wanted to speed up
the drill so nobody would get hurt.

Travis contends that company and
Nuclear Regulatory Commission officials were so concerned that the plant would
fail its triannual drill this year that they canceled it just a few days before
it was scheduled in June, citing a “safety concern” that rifles used in the
drills were emitting too much carbon dioxide.

He said the company rushed to have
the security system, made by a company named ARINC, operational by Feb. 18,
2011, to avoid hefty fines by the NRC. Travis said the company expected him and
other lieutenants to operate the system with little or no training and that
they were ill-equipped to fix the system when it repeatedly failed.

Supervisors also encouraged
employees to falsify records related to how much security training they
received, according to the lawsuit. One employee filled out paperwork
indicating he had received more than 60 hours of training — on a single day,
the lawsuit alleges.

And there’s much more, like the fact “that the company
encourages security staff to bring laptops so they can watch movies and play
video games to keep from falling asleep during their shifts.” Says his attorney Amy Bellantoni,
who filed the suit for “$20 million dollars in compensatory damages and $1.5
billion in punitive damages, …’The only way to make an impact ... is to hit
them in their pocket.’”

The plant’s license is up for renewal and state officials,
including Governor Cuomo and AG Schneiderman, want the plant shut down.
But whether they can manage to do that,
given the federal government’s preemption of the entire nuclear field,
remains to be seen.

September 11, 2012

Show of hands –who here said a silent “Huh? to themselves
when Jeb Bush, paying tribute to his brother W during the GOP convention,
uttered the following: “he kept us safe.” Wow. Now, with even more evidence surfacing that the CIA had
repeatedly warned W that al Qaeda was about to attack (see Kurt
Eichenwald’s op ed in the New York Times today)
what do you do with a statement like that?

One thing you may not want to do is come anywhere near the expanding number of angry 9/11 victims,
whose latent diseases are multiplying daily. Thirty days from tomorrow, a new rule will go into effect
that adds 50 cancers “to the list of sicknesses covered by a $4.3 billion fund
set up to treat and compensate people exposed to the dust, smoke and fumes of
the collapsing World Trade Center.”

It’s been 11 years since terrorists destroyed the World
Trade Center towers, and more than a year-and-a-half since President Barack
Obama signed into law a bill meant to compensate responders and survivors
sickened from exposure to the hazardous debris and toxins of Ground Zero.

“It's going to be a process, and I think it's going to take
a year or two until that process really gets moving," said Sheila
Birnbaum, the special master of the $2.775 billion 9/11 Victims Compensation Fund. "People have to
get medical records, they have to do all kinds of things, and they're going to
have to get certified that they meet the criteria.”

The compensation fund was supposed to start work in July of
2011, and many believed that money would start to flow a year later. It hasn't,
and although there are explanations for why, people whose lives were shattered
by the terrorists' attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, are starting to get frustrated.

“These people need the money. I talk to a lot of them,
they're all struggling along and they're not getting anything,” said Joe
Zadroga, the father of the late police officer after whom the Zadroga Act is
named.

“These people are really down,” Zadroga added. “I just get
upset about it because we fought so hard to get that bill passed, and now
they're dragging their feet on it.”

“We still haven't gotten 10 cents,” said TJ Gilmartin, a
construction worker from Brooklyn who rushed to Ground Zero with a truck after
the attacks, and has seen his ability to work deteriorate, along with the
health of his lungs.

And while they wait, the 9/11 casualty count grows. As ABC News reports,

“They’re only about ten years too late,” said Jeffrey
Stroehlein, who retired from the New York Fire Department in May 2011, two
months after he was diagnosed with a type of brain cancer that affects the
central nervous system. “I’m watching people die of these diseases, these
ailments, as they go on and play ping pong,” he said of government officials
arguing over whether cancer should be included in Zadroga Act coverage.

Meanwhile, Larry Silverstein, leaseholder of the World Trade
Center property, is still pursing his tort case against United Airlines, American
Airlines, Boeing, the Massachusetts Port Authority, and security companies for
property losses due to security breaches, which allowed the hijackers to board
the planes. Writes Reuters, “[t]wo
recent rulings by a federal judge in New York denying the airlines’ bid to
dismiss the lawsuit over a narrow insurance dispute have opened the door to the
entire case ending up in the hands of a jury.”

Silverstein is seeking $8.4 billion in damages for loss of
property and lost business, even though U.S. District Judge Alvin Hellerstein
has limited the amount to the $2.8 billion Silverstein paid for the leases. The
lawsuit is among the last pieces of litigation resulting from the attacks of
September 11, 2001, which killed more than 3,000 people in New York, the
Pentagon outside Washington, and Pennsylvania.

The aviation defendants’ liability insurance is estimated at
more than $10 billion, according to court documents. Among dozens of insurers
of American Airlines are Associated Aviation Underwriters Inc and Avion
Assurance Limited insurance groups. United Airlines has U.S. Aircraft Insurance
Group and British Aviation Insurance Group among its insurers.…

Financial services firm Cantor Fitzgerald is also suing
American Airlines over lost business and the destruction of its offices in the
World Trade Center. The firm said in a court filing last March it was seeking
between $464 million and $488.8 million in property damages. American Airlines
Flight 11 struck the north tower, killing 658 Cantor employees. United Airlines
Flight 175 crashed into the south tower.

And if you need some reminder of what W was doing when those
two planes hit Cantor, here a little refresher:

May 29, 2012

Last June, we covered a very angry town meeting with a number of 9/11 clean up workers, which was held by Sheila Birnbaum, the corporate lawyer in charge of administering the compensation fund for them. The meeting was held “two days after a federal review found insufficient evidence linking cancer to Sept. 11 to warrant adding cancer to the list of conditions covered.” Yet we now know that 60.8 percent of people who were just living in a damaged apartment in Lower Manhattan following 9/11 have respiratory diseases. How could breathing in the kind of crap that caused such severe disease among workers on the pile not have caused at least some cancer?

We should note that much beloved disco singer (and Lower Manhattan resident) Donna Summer recently died of lung cancer, and she apparently blamed 9/11. Now, this seems a bit peculiar for several reasons, including the fact that she was a smoker. So "anomaly” is not the word you want connected to this issue, and hopefully it won’t be when Dr. John Howard, director of the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, decides this week whether cancers can be treated as compensation for purposes of the $4.3 billion fund set up to help sick and dying 9/11 workers. Writes the New York Times in a front page story today:

An advisory committee in March found justification for covering 14 broad categories of cancer, raising expectations that the fund would cover at least some of them. But such a decision would create a logistical quagmire, advocates for patients and government officials conceded, and could strain the fund’s resources.

“Depending on the numbers of cancers and the criteria for those cancers, we would certainly be getting more and different claims than we were receiving previously,” said Sheila Birnbaum, the special master overseeing the Sept. 11 Victim Compensation Fund. “We cannot add any more money to the fund, so we would have to prorate what we’re giving to people depending on the amount of people that apply, the seriousness of their injuries, the economic loss that they’ve sustained.” …

Here’s one big problem: cancers take many years to develop, but the fund will eventually run out of money and then will disband.

Paul Gerasimczyk, a police officer working a morning tour, was sent downtown as the first tower collapsed. He served 12-hour shifts six days a week for “a very long time,” he said. He retired in 2005, and then got what has become known as the World Trade Center cough. In 2007, he was told that he had renal cell cancer, which is also on the committee list. “People who have yet to get sick, I imagine a lot of them will end up indigent,” Mr. Gerasimczyk, 53, said.

February 27, 2012

Yesterday marked the 19thanniversary of 1993 terrorist bombing of the World Trade Center. It’s hard for many of us to even recall this event in light of the horrific events of 9/11, yet that first bombing did kill six people and injured hundreds of others. Many of those victims sued the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, since the agency had been warned about the trade center’s vulnerability to bomb attacks. But it’s been some struggle. Last September – that’s right, September 2011 – a divided state Court of Appeals finally found the agency immune from suit.

Lately, New York state courts haven’t been terribly kind to victims of terrorism and human rights abuses.

Tomorrow, the U.S. Supreme Court hears an incredibly important case called Kiobel v. Royal Dutch Petroleum, stemming from a federal lawsuit brought under the Alien Tort statute, a remarkable federal law that allows people from countries outside the United States to sue foreign individuals and multinational corporations that commit human rights violations abroad - like torture, crimes against humanity, war crimes, genocide, disappearances, summary execution, that kind of thing. No other country in the world has a statute like this.

Under the Alien Tort statute, those who order or authorize the violations can be held liable. Those with command responsibility, including those with authority over the actions of their troops and subordinates, who knew about the violations, can be liable. Also, some cases have allowed suits against groups involved in human rights violations (e.g., the Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front, the Islamic Salvation Front). Individuals who commit genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes can be held liable even if they are not acting with the authority of the state. (See more here.)

And until Kiobel, corporations headquartered or doing business in the United States have always been liable, as well. (We've covered some of this here.) But the 2nd Circuit changed everything. An article in the Harvard International Law Journal explained it this way:

On September 17, 2010, a two-judge majority of the Second Circuit held in Kiobel v. Royal Dutch Petroleum Co. that “corporate liability is not a discernable—much less universally recognized—norm of customary international law that we may apply pursuant to the [Alien Tort Statute].” The Alien Tort Statute (“ATS”) is a well-known tool that grants U.S. federal courts jurisdiction over civil suits brought by aliens for torts committed in violation of international law. The statute has been used for the past three decades to hold perpetrators of human rights abuses accountable in U.S. courts. Some ATS cases have involved conflict zones, and since the mid-1990s, ATS cases have been brought against corporations for their alleged involvement in human rights violations.

Prior to the Kiobel court’s ruling on September 17, no appellate court had ever held that corporations were not subject to suit under the ATS. Indeed, numerous corporate ATS cases had proceeded through the courts with no indication that corporations could not be held liable or that this was an issue of subject matter jurisdiction. By ruling that the scope of liability for a violation of a given international norm does not extend to corporations, the Second Circuit majority, in the words of concurring Judge Leval, “deals a substantial blow to international law and its undertaking to protect fundamental human rights.”

The scary part now is that the U.S. Supreme Court is about to get its hands on this case. Why scary? When you think about it, treating corporations like people should be a no-brainer for this Court. As David Savage at the LA Timesput it,

Two years ago, the Supreme Court said corporations were like people and had the same free-speech rights to spend unlimited sums on campaigns ads. Now, in a major test of human rights law, the justices will decide whether corporations are like people when they are sued for aiding foreign regimes that kill or torture their own people.

But then again, there’s this other principle at work with this Court - letting corporations get away with whatever they want. Peter Weiss, vice president of the Center for Constitutional Rights in New York, wrote a powerful op ed in the New York Times over the weekend, explaining:

Next week, the Supreme Court will hear a case with many potential ramifications for American and international law, and for corporate responsibility for human rights around the globe. The justices will be asked to decide whether the corporations to which they have been extending the rights of individuals should also be held accountable for crimes against human rights, just as individuals are....

[D]ozens of successful alien tort claims have been brought in American courts — at first against individuals, and eventually against corporations. As a result, many foreign victims of egregious crimes — ranging from torture and slave labor to the execution of loved ones — that were sanctioned, endorsed or commissioned by corporations have found justice in our courts.

Yet in September 2010, a divided Second Circuit — the very court that had rendered the Filártiga decision — held that only individuals, and not corporations, can be sued under the statute.

That ruling, in a case known as Kiobel v. Royal Dutch Petroleum, came less than a year after the much more famous — and criticized — Supreme Court decision in Citizens United, which removed restrictions on political spending by contributions and wildly expanded the concept of corporate personhood.

Together, these decisions have triggered a wave of outrage among advocates for human rights, which see in them a signal from the courts that corporations have extensive rights but few responsibilities under American law.

October 05, 2011

I’m glad someone else caught CNN’s new celeb “anchor du jour” Erin Burnett offering a “condescending and reductionist” analysis yesterday while covering the Occupy Wall Street movement. Of course, it isn’t the first time this ex-Goldman Sachs/Citigroup employee used her TV perch to serve as a mouthpiece and apologist for Wall St. abuses, but at least people are noticing.

Speaking of Occupy Wall Street, which is marching today along with at least 15 major unions not too far from ThePopTort’s offices in Lower Manhattan, a group of them have now filed suit against New York City and the NYPD for tactics used in arresting 700 peaceful protesters on the Brooklyn Bridge last weekend.

A lot of people have been taking note of how the NYPD has been handling this protest, which is mostly taking place in an area that has been a virtual police state since 9/11 - just between the World Trade Center and the New York Stock Exchange. We know. We used to work a couple blocks away. (Just forget trying to cross a street without navigating block-long barricade.) While the NYPD has been getting lots of media attention for their anti-terrorism work, they’re also getting tons of attention for their abuses. And it’s not just the Occupy Wall Street protestors or the city’s Muslim community that has grounds to complain.

[New York City] paid out $135 million to settle claims made against the NYPD last year - a soaring 71% jump in settlements against the department from a decade ago.

The surge - part of a half-billion dollars paid out by the city - included $56.4 million for alleged police misconduct, including excessive force and false arrest, an analysis by City Comptroller John Liu found.

Advocates said the number marks a disturbing trend: in 2003, Mayor Bloomberg’s first fiscal year in office, the city paid out $68 million in NYPD tort claims.

“This number and the increase over past decade cry out for close monitoring of the police,” said Donna Lieberman, head of the New York Civil Liberties Union.

“The NYPD’s hyper-aggressive tactics create a situation that is ripe for litigation,” she said.

And as we also noted, the solutions to this “pay out” problem lie not with taking away people’s rights but with reducing the misconduct that leads to claims in the first place. Lets hope it doesn’t escalate now.

July 29, 2011

It seems no matter how hard we try, 9/11 keeps moving to the #1 position of this country’s collective Netflix que. On Wednesday, friends of mine were in a plane that was forced to land when someone wrote the word “bomb” on bathroom tissue paper. There is intense discussion about the contribution to the debt crisis of two wars that we started in the aftermath of that tragedy.

And yesterday, reports the Associated Press, Sheila Birnbaum, the corporate lawyer in charge of administering the $2.8 billion compensation fund for sick and injured 9/11 clean up workers (see our early sense of Ms. Birnbaum here), “got an earful” from “about 50 first responders and others at a town hall meeting in City Hall two days after a federal review found insufficient evidence linking cancer to Sept. 11 to warrant adding cancer to the list of conditions covered.... Birnbaum, the fund's special master, said she was ‘representing the victims’ at the town hall meeting in Jersey City, across the Hudson River from ground zero. ‘If you have a problem, you can take it up with Congress,’ she said. ‘That's what we have to deal with it.’”

What at fighter. Moreover,

[T]hose who say toxic dust from the destroyed twin towers traveled from ground zero over the Hudson River to Jersey City and other communities will not be eligible. Birnbaum said there simply wasn't the scientific evidence to prove injuries sustained outside New York City were caused by the attacks.

That may disqualify Joann Sullivan, a 40-year-old who was working at a Jersey City bar in September 2001 and said she aided survivors as they returned from the World Trade Center to New Jersey, picking up contamination as she doled out water and food to those in crisis.

"I felt that it was my job as an American to do what we had to do," she said.

Sullivan said she later developed an inflammatory lung condition called pulmonary sarcoidosis, rashes and a fever — all of which she attributes to 9/11. She said she lost two jobs because of the dozens of legions that visibly marked her body. ...

On Wednesday, Birnbaum addressed participants in New York, who expressed similar frustration over the exclusion of cancer from the list of covered illnesses. A third town hall will be held Tuesday in Melville, N.Y.

But while justice may be elusive for these selfless folks, one of the families suing United Airlines over horrendously poor security measures, which allowed the 9/11 hijackers to carry weapons onto Flight 175 (the second plane that crashed into the World Trade Center) and murder 56 passengers plus crew, may get just what until now had seemed completely elusive.

On Wednesday, the judge, Alvin K. Hellerstein of Federal District Court, said that he would probably allow [Mark] Bavis’s mother, Mary, the plaintiff, to seek such damages, despite strenuous objections by United, which had argued that she was not entitled to such a recovery under the law of Massachusetts, where Mr. Bavis lived.

Judge Hellerstein listened to arguments by lawyers for the family and United, and said his inclination was to allow the jury to come up with “a figure for pain and suffering” through the entire 21-minute period.

[T]he case would be the only wrongful-death lawsuit stemming from Sept. 11, 2001, to go to trial.

In other words, this is the only family not willing to settle their case through either the compensation fund or lawsuits that were filed.

Brother Michael Bavis "added that he felt positive because Judge Hellerstein seemed to keep an open mind, and in his view, recognized the importance of having the story of Flight 175 told in the courtroom. 'This is my brother’s voice, this trial.'"

May 18, 2011

"Really!?! with Seth and Amy" isn’t my favorite SNL Weekend Update sketch, but I have to say, it came to mind immediately when I heard that Sheila Birnbaum was appointed by the Justice Department today to oversee distribution of the new $2.5 billion fund for sick and dying Ground Zero workers.

Really? The only person in America who could do this job was a State Farm insurance company corporate lawyer who fought Katrina victims who were left destitute because State Farm and other insurers refused to pay their legitimate claims? And then she discussed her successes at a Web Seminar for the extreme-right Washington Legal Foundation?

Really? The only person in America who could do this job was a lawyer who has been so successful at crushing the claims of corporate negligence victims on behalf of her corporate clients that she has been dubbed the “Queen of Torts?” Really?

I mean really, the Administration believes this individual will be better at helping sick and injured workers than any lawyer with actual experience helping the sick and injured? And who generates media coverage like this from the Wall Street Journal?

Companies have often turned to Birnbaum, a former law professor and fourth-grade teacher, in times of distress. In 2004, she represented Chiron after the company received negative publicity for its flu vaccine. “Sheila was my quarterback,” said Nancy Koch, formerly a senior lawyer at Chiron who worked closely with Birnbaum during the crisis. Ultimately, the SEC formally closed its investigation without taking any action, a securities-fraud lawsuit was settled and the product-liability actions were dismissed.

Birnbaum has also helped State Farm in other big cases. In 2005, Birnbaum helped convince the Illinois Supreme Court to dismiss a class-action judgment of more than $1 billion against the insurer. She also represented State Farm before the Supremes in the big 2003 ruling that placed caps on punitive damage awards, a decision seen as a big win for corporate America.

“Sheila Birnbaum has been one of our most effective advocates in litigation for a number of years and has played a central and significant role in Hurricane Katrina litigation,” said Kim Brunner, State Farm’s general counsel.

Now, I don’t know Sheila Birnbaum and I realize that she has mediated some wrongful death and injury lawsuits on behalf of some 9/11 victims. And Ground Zero worker spokesperson John Feal, who worked tirelessly to get Congress to pass the $2.5 billion fund, has hopes for Ms. Birnbaum even though this was not his choice, so we have to be hopeful too.

But, really?

(You can learn more about State Farm’s despicable post-Katrina behavior by listening to testimony from former Mississippi Congressman Gene Taylor.)

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